Attacks On Israel Ignore The Long History Of Arab Conflict - Murray Bookchin

Attacks on Israel Ignore the Long
History of Arab Conflict

Murray Bookchin

Burlington Free Press , May 4, 1986

There is certainly much one can criticize about
Israeli policy, particularly under the Likud
government which orchestrated the invasion of
Lebanon. But the torrent of anti-Israeli sentiment
that has surfaced in the local press and the virtual
equation of Zionism with anti-Arab racism impels me
to reply with some vigor.

For years I had hoped that Israel or Palestine
could have evolved into a Swiss-like confederation of
Jews and Arabs, a confederation in which both
peoples could live peacefully with each other and
develop their cultures creatively and harmoniously.

Tragically, this was not to be. The United Nations

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resolution of 1947, which partitioned Palestine into
Jewish and Arab states, was followed by the invasion
of the country by Arab armies, notably the Egyptian,
Syria, and highly trained Jordanian "Arab Legion"
with direct or indirect aid from Iraq and other Arab
nations.

In some cases these armies, particularly the Arab
irregulars who accompanied them, took no prisoners
in their assaults on Jewish communities. Generally,
they tried to systematically obliterate all Jewish
settlements in their paths until they were stopped by
furious and costly Jewish resistance.

The invasion and the annihilatory combat it
created set a terrible pattern of fear and bitterness
that is not easy to erase from the minds of Israeli
Jews. That a desperate lunatic element of Jewish
zealots behaved in kind before it was stopped by the
newly formed Israeli military forces should not allow
us to forget the Jewish men and women who were

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slaughtered by the stalwarts of Arab nationalism
even after they had raised white flags of surrender.

I have seen very little mention of this fearful
pattern of "combat" which stained the Arab
invasions of Palestine and so profoundly influenced
Jewish confidence in the value of "truce
negotiations" and the predictability of peace
agreements with Arab irredentists. Indeed, the
partition lines that were eventually established after
the 1948 invasions were the product of bloody
warfare - literally the give-and-take of battle - not
the "imperialistic" or "land-grabbing Zionists," to use
the language that is so much in vogue these days.

Nor do I hear any longer of the ernest attempts
by the the Haganah - the Jewish citizens' militia of
the partition era - to encourage Arabs to remain in
their neighborhoods and towns, of the Israeli
vehicles with loudspeakers that went through the
streets of Jaffa, for example, urging Arabs not to

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succumb to the feelings of panic engendered by
battle conditions and by extremists on both sides of
the conflict.

That many Arabs remained in Israel clearly
challenges the myth that Israeli Jews tried to rid the
country of its Moslem inhabitants. What seems to be
totally ignored is the certainty that there would have
been an Arab state in Palestine side-by-side with a
Jewish one if Egyptian armies to the south, Syrian in
the north, and Jordanian in the east had not tried to
seize both U.N.-Partitioned lands with imperialist
interests of their own and, when this failed, used the
Palestinian refugees as pawns in future negotiations
with the Israelis and their western supporters.

There is another myth that must be removed:
that the present volatile situation in the Middle East
has its source in the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts;
indeed, that the relationship between the Jews and
Arabs was "beatific" until it was poisoned by "Zionist

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ambitions." Leaving aside the simplistic image of
Middle East problems that this notion fosters, the
extent to which it is a sheer distortion of Jewish-
Arab relations in the past verges on the
unspeakable.

Are we to forget that Arab persecution of Jews,
while less genocidal than European, has a centuries-
long history of its own with the exception of Moslem
Spain and Ottoman Turkey? That Arab pogroms
against the Jews accompanies the Jewish settlement
of pre-World War II Palestine, culminating in the
extermination of the ages-old Jewish community of
Hebron (once the seat of the Hebrew tribal
confederacy) in the late 1920s? That the Grand Mufti
of Jerusalem in the 1930s (the precursor of Yassar
Arafat two generations ago) was an avowed admirer
of Hitler and called for a "holy war" of extermination
of Palestinian Jews up to and into World War II? That
Jordan's "Arab Legion" systematically leveled the old
Jewish quarter of Jerusalem in 1948 and stabled

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horses at the Western Wall of Herod's Temple,
defiling the most sacred place of world Judaism?

Are we to forget that General Hafez Assad, the
so-called "president" of Syria (elected by a
"majority" of 99.97 percent of the Syrian
"electorate") slaughtered between 6,000 to 10,000
people in Kama in February 1982, for daring to
challenge his leadership of the country?

One wonders why there was no storm of protest
when Amnesty International in 1983 declared that
"Syrian security forces have practiced systematic
violations of human rights, including torture and
political killings, and have been operating with
impunity under the country's emergency laws"? Why
is there no concern over Syrian imperialism -
notably Assad's fantasy of absorbing Lebanon and
Palestine, including Israel, if you please, into a
Syrian empire - a goal every objective expert in the
Middle East knows to be Assad's Arabic version of

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Rabi Kahane's insane version of a "Greater-Israel" -
a notion that has been vigorously denounced by
responsible Jewish and Zionist organizations in
Israel and abroad.

If the "core problem" of the Middle East, to use
Miriam Ward's words in her Vermont Perspective of
April 27, is the confiscation of Palestinian land by
Israel, what would the whole area look like if Israel
and its Jewish population magically disappeared
from the scene? Would Syria be less of a police state
than it is today and would its Sunni Moslem majority
feel less dominated, exploited, and manipulated by
General Assad, who tends to speak for the Alawite
Moslem minority of the country?

Would Saudi princes cease to squander much of
their country's wealth on limosines, palaces, jewels,
and real estate abroad, much less bring a modicum
of freedom to their own people at home? Would
Egyptian landowners, living in lavish opulence

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amidst incredible squalor, return a fraction of their
landholdings to a starved Egyptian peasantry? Would
Iraq free its Kurdish population to speak only of its
most vocal and rebellious minorities, or meet their
demands for genuine equal autonomy?

Would the Iraq-Iran war come to an end, a war
that has already claimed a million lives in the past
few years? Would Colonel Khadafy cease to be a
strutting militarist who has been trying to eat away
at the territories of many of his neighbors? Would
Khomeni and Moslem fundamentalism, whose main
thrust is against any form of modernity and western
culture, give equality to women and freedom to
critics of Iran's present-day theocratic regime?

What is so disquieting about many persistent
attacks on Israel is that they help to completely
obfuscate what is really a "core problem" of the
Palestinian people. This abandoned people is being
used in the most unconscionable manner by the

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Arab states to conceal deep-seated economic, social,
and cultural problems in their own lands and in the
Middle East as a whole. That the differences
between the Israelis and Palestinians have to be
resolved equitably such that both people can live
with a sense of security that resolves their fears of
what has happened in the past and achieve a
constructive harmony with each other goes without
saying.

I am not sure what that solution will be. But it
certainly will not be achieved by acts of PLO-related
terrorism against independently minded Arab
mayors who are trying to negotiate a settlement
between the two peoples at one end of the spectrum
or lunatics like Rabbi Kahane at the other end who
are trying to expel the Palestinians from their
landholdings and communities.

But crucial as such a settlement surely is, we
should not bury the real "core problem" of the

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Middle East as embodied by its cynical politicians,
landowners, oil barons, military juntas, fanatic
clerics, and imperialistic predators in the welter of
tragic problems that have emerged between the
Israelis and the Palestinians.

Given this background, it would be wise to
remember that both peoples have more interests in
common than they have differences. It would be a
splendid example of political independence if people
who raise a justifiable hue about military juntas in
Latin America would remind themselves that they
are confronted with an exact parallel in the Middle
East - from Colonel Khadafy to General Assad.

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